Tuesday, 17 November 2015

Jigsaw Activity - Best Answer

Sometimes we need ideas for activities that get students up, moving, and collaborating with their peers. This allows them to demonstrate their thinking in a different way. One fun way to accomplish this is to use this jigsaw activity - best answer.

Have a variety of different questions that you want students to be working on - you will want about 4-5 students working on the same question. You will also need different coloured post it notes. Each question correlates to a different colour.

Post the questions on the board and ensure that students understand which question correlates to each colour. Distribute one post it note to each student - you can distribute these randomly, or you can be strategic based on the students that you have in your class - and tell them to write the best answer that they can to their question on their post it note. Once all of the students have written down an answer, they will get up and find all of the classmates who had the same coloured post it note. As a group, they will determine who had the best answer. They should be able to explain why they chose the answer that they did. They will share their question and answer with the class.

My favourite time to use this activity is in exam preparation. I will use an old reading comprehension multiple choice exam and complete the reading (short story, poem, non fiction) together. Then I take the questions associated with the text and use these as the questions that students will answer on their post its. Students will not see the four multiple choice options. After students present their best answer as a group, I will show the four multiple choice options. As a class, we discuss which of these options comes closest to the answer that the group came up with. Then we will see if that is the correct answer.

Food for thought... what are some fun activities that you can do as an alternative to traditional exam prep?